House of Books & Friends are delighted to announce that we are hosting the Feminist Book Club with facilitator Kate Feld. Taking place monthly, this will be a space for people of all genders to discuss feminist books. In November, we will be discussing A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux.
Tickets
Book and ticket: £9.99
Ticket only: £3
As always, there are a limited amount of complimentary tickets available for those who need them. Please contact us directly at bookworms@houseofbooksandfriends.com or call 07597 365380.
About the book
On 7 April 1986, Annie Ernaux’s mother, after years of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, died in a retirement home in the suburbs of Paris. Shocked by this loss which, despite her mother’s condition, she had refused to fathom, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time in an effort to recover the different facets of a woman whose openness to the world and appetite for reading created the conditions for the author’s own social ascent.
Mirroring A Man’s Place, in which she narrates her father’s slow rise to material comfort, A Woman’s Story explores the ambiguous and unshakeable bond between mother and daughter, its fluctuation over the course of their lives, the alienating worlds that separate them and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love. In this quietly powerful tribute to the last thread connecting her to the world out of which she was born, Ernaux attempts to do her mother the greatest justice she can: to portray her as the individual she was.
Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Tanya Leslie was the first translator of Annie Ernaux into English and translated a number of her works, including A Woman’s Story (1991), A Man’s Place (1992), Simple Passion (1993), Shame (1998), I Remain in Darkness (1999) and Happening (2001), all for Seven Stories Press in the US.
About Kate
Kate Feld is a writer who grew up in in the U.S. state of Vermont and now lives outside Manchester, UK. She writes poetry, short fiction, essays and prose that sits between forms. Her writing explores the natural world, mythology and the unconscious, often taking the form of lyric narratives that both interrogate and celebrate lived experience. Her work has been published widely in journals and anthologies including The Stinging Fly, The Letters Page, Hotel and Tolka. She is the founding editor of UK creative nonfiction journal and reading series The Real Story, and lectures in Journalism at the University of Salford. Her chapbook of poetry and photography, Deeryard, is forthcoming from Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers.
